Major tests (All Blacks, South Africa, England, Lions) will generally have higher numbers because people are more willing to travel from further (and pay the amount asked) to see them. I'll make the trip to up Sydney for a Bledisloe, but not to see Scotland, and so on. At that point, there really is no reason to take the test anywhere but Brisbane or Sydney.
As a Canberran, hell yeah, I want a test in the nation's capital more often, and some kind of reward for having the highest attendance per capita of any Super side in Australia, but I also recognise that home test matches are big money for Australian Rugby and a big part of that is the fact that 60,000 people paying $150 a ticket is just shy of $10,000,000.
However, it's game over for the Wallabies as a national side if we give less than 1/6th of tests to cities like Melbourne and Perth. We need them to know that Australian Rugby thinks of them as home just as much as they think of Sydney or Brisbane, and we need to tap into that primal desire to support the team that plays where you live if we want to capture the hearts of juniors.
We averaged 5.9 tests per year over the last ten years, and this new international calendar is going to help make that more regular. We can also try and get teams that would never tour (like Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Japan, Scotland, Italy, Romania, Georgia, Canada, the US) to have the occasional game in Australia, such that we have a couple of mid-week games to give to smaller venues.
Say the schedule remains a three game tour, a home-and-away Rugby Championship, and we try to get a minnow or two in during the international window. Even discounting the occasional third Bledisloe, that's seven or eight home tests a year. Sydney should always have two. Brisbane, Perth, and Melbourne should always have one, with a second rotating between the three. Canberra, Newcastle, and Gold Coast can rotate the minnow game, and we can consider using that game to establish a Wallabies presence in places like Adelaide, or Townsville, or Gosford.
